Why Cloudflare's Free-Plan Cache Rules Don't Cache Your HTML (And the Page Rules Fix That Does)

A 90-minute debugging session, with curl outputs. TL;DR We run a 6,800-page games portal behind Cloudflare on the Free plan. Last week's audit flagged that cf-cache-status was returning DYNAMIC for every HTML request, despite an origin Cache-Control: s-maxage=31536000 . We spent 90 minutes building Cache Rules with every "correct" config — Eligible for cache, Edge TTL, browser TTL, expression filters covering 8 path patterns — and Cloudflare still refused to cache HTML. The fix wasn't another tw